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Mustangpeak is quite simply me, Jim Kueneman. I have been a Borland Pascal fan since TP5.5 and worked my way up through TP.6, Turbo Pascal for Windows, and Delphi. I don't program for a living this is mainly a hobby for me, which explains why the help files are not very helpful! Writing help is not fun and that is what hobbies are suppose to be, fun.
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Up until a few years ago I was a "closet" programmer and it was not until I discovered Mike Lischke's Virtual Treeview (VT) did I "come out of the closet" so to speak. I have always been fascinated by the Windows shell and had many false starts trying to create an Explorer Treeview/Listview clone. All were dropped due to the disappointment of the common controls performance. That all changed when I found VT. With Mike'e encouragement I created a VT based Explorer Tree, VirtualExplorerTree (VET) was the name coined by Mike. As the development of VET matured I started to dig out other half finished projects and added them to the package until it finally became VirtualShellTools 1.0. (VSTools)
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After VSTools matured it was time to find another project, CoolControl. This project started out as a desire to create a replacement for TListview that had the performance and design characteristics of VT. After may philosophical discussions on a Yahoo Group, VirtualListview started to take shape. After a few false starts it became apparent that the virtual nature of VT could be taken on more level of abstraction and the control could be much more than a Listview. It could be a generalized grid control that could be modified by changing a "plug in". I thought this was cool, hence the name change to CoolControl.
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Along the way of creating VSTools, which access the shell by querying it from the front end much like Explorer, a significant amount of code was developed to plug into the back end of the shell in the way of Shell Extensions and Namespace Extension. Shell Extensions are the way the shell allows applications to add Context Menu items to Explorer, add new Column in the Listview (ME, Win2k, and XP only), Create Thumbnail extraction handler for different file types, etc. Namespace Extensions (NSE's) are items that actually show up in Explorer. The Recycle Bin, Internet Explorer and MyDocuments are a few of examples that come with Windows. There are may other 3rd party NSEs such as an FTP client. The core of this is written it just need to be polished up to be more user friendly.
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My free time is much less these days as our two little girls are growing and my real job becomes more hectic so these new projects are not progressing as fast as I would like but I do work on them as much as I can.
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That is enough rambling, but one last thing. What is MustangPeak. Well it is a mountain that I look at every day as I sit at my kitchen table. |
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